I am a teacher, lawyer and author with a background in social sciences as well as diverse life experiences in various economic sectors and geographic locations. I am a family man and resident of South Jeffco, Colorado, active in political and civic affairs. Between graduating law school and returning to teaching, I worked as a public policy researcher and analyst and as an independent policy consultant, addressing issues of child and family welfare and mental health services. I have sat on the boards of directors and advisory councils of various nonprofits, am currently forming a nonprofit (The Transcendental Politics Foundation), and have engaged in various community organizing efforts. I am an avid blogger and essayist, have published one novel and currently have two books —one nonfiction and one fiction– in development, and am strongly committed to the active cultivation of our consciousness and our compassion in service to our shared humanity.

Long Version

I grew up in Glencoe, IL, a suburb of Chicago, the youngest of five kids, with a small businessman dad and a stay-at-home mom. I graduated from New Trier West High School in 1977, after a childhood that was outwardly mundane but inwardly surreal, as I suspect many childhoods are to those who experience them.

After two years at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, I decided to take a break from school, and seek a different sort of education. For the next seven and a half years, I worked, traveled and lived in various parts of the world and various parts of the United States, experiencing as many different aspects of life as I could. I worked in fields, factories, and offices; with infants, children, and the elderly; in education, sales, and health care; in Asia, Europe, Texas, and California; with stints on an old hippy farming commune, in a yeshivah in the Old City of Jerusalem with a balcony overlooking the Wailing Wall and the Dome of the Rock, in a holistic healing college, and as an enlisted infantryman in the United States Army (stationed in what was then West Germany).

During that time, I had some marvelous adventures and (outwardly) surreal (but inwardly mundane?) experiences (such as debating political theory with an Irish Marxist while riding camelback across the Thar Desert of Rajastan, India), amidst a backdrop of amazing settings, gorgeous landscapes, various vessels on various seas, ancient towns and cities, and a moving feast of camping, hiking, hitchhiking, backpacking, reading, writing, storytelling, music-making, conversing, and, in general, enjoying the fleeting company and abundant hospitality of new and old friends from Southeast Asia to Northwestern Europe, and from the Atlantic to Pacific coasts of our own spectacular country.

I returned to SIU and finished my B.A. in Sociology. During those last years of college, I founded and presided over an International Relations Club, volunteered on a crisis intervention hotline, and wrote for a small local publication. I then completed my M.A. in Sociology at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, and continued on in the Ph.D. program for five more years (being ABD, “all-but-dissertation,” for more than two of those years), though I elected to write a novel rather than my dissertation.

In graduate school, I taught undergraduate classes in Introduction to Sociology, Criminology, Social Change, Complex Organizations, and Social Problems, and did both ethnographic and theoretical research into how better to deliver outreach services to heroin addicts in blighted urban settings (though our model applies more broadly). I presented papers at conferences of Sociologists, Political Scientists, and Economists, as well as being a guest of the Dutch government at Leyden University in the Netherlands for a week long symposium on the integration of microeconomic analysis and network analysis.

I moved from Connecticut to a cabin in the mountains of northern New Mexico in 1996, where I spent a year writing the first draft of the novel I had been developing (An epic mythology). I then moved down to Albuquerque, where I was adjunct faculty in the sociology department of the University of New Mexico and continued to study economics, history, and other subjects while developing both my novel and other ideas for works of fiction. In December, 1999, I moved to Mazatlan, Mexico, where I finished the novel (since published) and met my wife, Dolores (Lolis).

We moved up to the Denver area in May of 2002, and into our house in South Jeffco in May of 2003. Our sweet, shy, and precocious daughter Scheherazade was born in August of 2003. From August of 2002 through August of 2007 I taught high school Social Studies (Intro, American History, American Government, World History, and World Geography) and Spanish (one year) in Denver Public Schools, Littleton Public Schools, and Jefferson County Public Schools, chairing the Community Outreach Network on my own time while teaching at Alameda High School in Jefferson County.

Finally drawn to applying some of this experience and education more directly to the challenge of forging sound social policies, I matriculated at the University of Colorado Law School in August 2007 on a full merit scholarship, with the intention of pursuing a career in public interest law.

In preparation for a career in public interest law, I took a broad sampling of law school classes relevant to public policy: Energy Security, Sustainable Energy; Energy Law and Regulation; Environmental Law; Climate Change Law and Policy; Public Land Law; Labor Law; Immigration Law and Policy; Education Law; Parent, Child, and State; Water Resources; Property Law; Constitutional Law; Tax Policy Seminar; Administrative Law; Legislative Practice; Lawyers for Social Change; and Colorado State and Local Government, to name a few.

While in law school, I did several legal internships and externships, including one during the summer of 2008 with Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network giving legal rights presentations and doing intake interviews, usually in Spanish, to detainees in removal procedings; another during the 2009 legislative session with Rep. Andy Kerr, then Assistant House Majority Leader of the Colorado House of Representatives; and one more during the summer of 2009 with the Center for Systems Integration, working on projects involving child and family health and welfare.

Having received my J.D. degree on May 7, 2010, I postponed taking (and passing) the Bar Exam until February 22 and 23, 2011, due to my unsuccessful candidacy in House District 28 (now HD 22) for the Colorado House of Representatives. Between law school and taking the Bar, during my candidacy, I did some independent policy consultancy regarding child and family and mental health services while looking for a permanent position in policy design and advocacy. I worked for a while in the summer and autumn of 2011 as the Executive Director of ClearMind, Inc., a newly established non-profit dedicated to a more holistic, evidence-driven, socially contextualized, and coordinated approach to mental health care. I also helped establish a Spanish-language political talk radio show in Denver and co-hosted the first couple of broadcasts.

I was a 2010-11 Colorado Leaders Fellow with the Center for Progressive Leadership; was formerly on the boards of directors of CHARG mental health resource center (actually “HEART,” the professional/community board that co-governs with a consumer board) and CLLARO (Colorado Latino Leadership, Advocacy, and Research Organization) and on the advisory council of the Colorado chapter of PAIMI (Protection and Advocacy of Individuals with Mental Illness). In 2011-12, I researched and wrote a report on obstacles to accessing mental health services by Medicaid-eligible children with dual diagnoses for Colorado Legal Services as a CU Law Judicial Fellow (see “The Harvey Report”). I am committed to contributing to the development of an ever more robust process of public policy production and implementation, reducing the degree to which we are engaged in a contest of relatively arbitrary ideological certainties, and increasing the degree to which we collectively and cooperatively apply reason and disciplined imagination to evidence in service to human welfare. I am currently forming a nonprofit organization, the Transcendental Politics Foundation, dedicated to cultivating more rational, imaginative, empathetic, humble and humane discourse and policy in specifically delineated methodological ways.

I returned to teaching in the Fall of 2012, was the Student Advisor at Kepner Middle School for the 2014-15 school year, taught in Cherry Creek and Douglas County the following years and, as of the most recent editing of this page (Spring 2018), am taking time off from teaching to write the first of two new books, “Transcendental Politics: A New Enlightenment,” which I intend to publish as an e-book by Fall 2018. (The other book, the completion of which is still years in the future, is an autobiographical novel that also focuses on Transcendental Politics, incorporating former farm workers’ organizer and current lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government Marshall Ganz’ “story of self, story of us, story of now” into what I believe is an intriguing storyline and structure.) Along with my passionate commitment to Transcendental Politics, I am interested in becoming involved in administration, curriculum design, and/or educational innovation and reform, treating education as the incubator of human consciousness rather than as merely an assembly line of ritualized and inadequate technical skills development. I am also open to other possibilities in the non-profit or public sector working on improving our social institutional landscape.

See Catalogue of Selected Posts for a hyperlinked index of some of the essays to be found on this site, organized by topic. The first box contains essays laying out my overarching complex dynamical social systems paradigm, perhaps best outlined in The Politics of Consciousness and most graphically represented in The Fractal Geometry of Social Change. The second box contains essays exploring what I now call “Transcendental Politics,” and formerly called “The Politics of Reason & Goodwill.” It is the blueprint for a deep structural, all-encompassing social movement that I consider “The Holy Grail” of political activism, advocating for diverting a small fraction of our resources dedicated to political activism and social change away from “the constant urgency of now,” and toward a long-term effort to move the zeitgeist, to facilitate the growth of human consciousness in politically relevant ways. The remaining boxes contain essays that explore various nuances and details of this combined paradigm of social systemic theory and conscious human praxis.